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The latest about what I've been working on

Favorite winners of Hugo Award for Best Novel
Favorite winners of Hugo Award for Best Novel

In May 2023, I finished reading all 71 of the winners of the the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. There were some fantastic books on that list and some real duds.

Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published
Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published

The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories is a new metadata vocabulary that extends the Darwin Core Standard to make it possible to describe the inventories and sampling events that are used to collect organism occurrence data. This is the largest extension to Darwin Core since the original vocabulary was ratified in 2009 and it represents over three years of work by the Humboldt Extension Task Group. This group of international experts met weekly over that time period to develop the vocabulary, carry out implementation testing, and publish the vocabulary and associated documentation.

Camtrap DP paper published
Camtrap DP paper published

Camera trapping is an increasingly important method used by ecologists for monitoring animals in the wild. Camera trap data has previously been difficult to publish by conventional means, since the data includes many related images or videos that must be associated with the occurrence data. The new Camtrap DP standard provides a way to package camera trap data based on the open Frictionless Data Package specification. Camtrap DP datasets can be easily exchanged or published to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) where the included occurrence data will be integrated with biodiversity data collected by other means.

Nine hundred images added to Wikimedia Commons from ACT
Nine hundred images added to Wikimedia Commons from ACT

Charlotte Lew and I have been working for some time to improve access to images in the Art in the Christian Tradition database by linking descriptive metadata in Wikidata to the corresponding artwork images in Wikimedia Commons. In the first part of the project, we were primarily cleaning up and linking Wikidata metadata to images that were already in Commons.

Building an Omeka website on AWS
Building an Omeka website on AWS

I recently finished building an Omeka digital collection for images from the files of Bassett Associates, a landscape architectural firm that operated for over 60 years in Lima, Ohio. This award-winning firm, which disbanded in 2017, was well known for its zoological design work and also did ground-breaking work in incorporating storm water retention as part of landscape site design.

Latest Posts

Favorite winners of Hugo Award for Best Novel
Favorite winners of Hugo Award for Best Novel

In May 2023, I finished reading all 71 of the winners of the the Hugo Award for Best Science Fiction or Fantasy novel. There were some fantastic books on that list and some real duds.

Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published
Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories Published

The Humboldt Extension for Ecological Inventories is a new metadata vocabulary that extends the Darwin Core Standard to make it possible to describe the inventories and sampling events that are used to collect organism occurrence data. This is the largest extension to Darwin Core since the original vocabulary was ratified in 2009 and it represents over three years of work by the Humboldt Extension Task Group. This group of international experts met weekly over that time period to develop the vocabulary, carry out implementation testing, and publish the vocabulary and associated documentation.

Camtrap DP paper published
Camtrap DP paper published

Camera trapping is an increasingly important method used by ecologists for monitoring animals in the wild. Camera trap data has previously been difficult to publish by conventional means, since the data includes many related images or videos that must be associated with the occurrence data. The new Camtrap DP standard provides a way to package camera trap data based on the open Frictionless Data Package specification. Camtrap DP datasets can be easily exchanged or published to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) where the included occurrence data will be integrated with biodiversity data collected by other means.